If you have Foxtel cable TV service in Australia, do not put up with the broken-as-delivered iQ3 box. Demand a “downgrade” to Foxtel’s very functional (and far more reliable) iQ2 box. We battled with an iQ3 for December 2016 and January 2017. Signed up to a special deal in November 2016 where the iQ3 was […]

While constructing content for a Plex Media Server (PMS) at home I’ve recently need to both split and merge .m4v files containing h264/aac encoded material. These are my notes to myself of what I did using ffmpeg after much googling. If you’re not me, hope these notes help you too 🙂 Splitting an m4v file Hypothetically, I’ve ended […]

Back on April 19th 2015 I ordered a Optical Digital Coaxial Toslink Signal To Analog Audio Converter Adapter from Banggood.com. It arrived April 30th 2015. For my own records — it works! Very simple use-case: The TV in our front lounge had a Toslink optical audio port, but no headphone jack. How to use headphones? An adapter, […]

On Dec 4th 2014 I purchased a “ESP8266 Remote Serial Port WIFI Transceiver Wireless Module” from banggood.com, based on an ESP8266 reference design by http://espressif.com. Here are my initial experiences poking around with the device. (Usual caveat — this post is largely to help my own recollections. If it helps you too, that’s a bonus.) Board […]

I purchased a cheap clone of the Saleae Logic 8 port logic analyser (LA) from Banggood.com on Dec 16th 2014. This page reflects my initial experiments with using the device under Windows 7 and FreeBSD 9.1. The clone does 8 channels of digital capture (no analog capture) and peaks at only 24MHz sample rate, but […]

Recently purchased an MB102 dual power supply from Banggood.com as part of a supply+breadboard+wires combo pack. Nice little unit — provides regulated 3.3V or 5V rails from 6.5-12 V (DC) or USB power supply, and has pins set up for plugging into a standard breadboard. The two separate output rails are independently configurable for 3.3V or […]

In December 2009 I rebuilt my home file server to be a FreeBSD 8.x machine with six 1.5TByte Western Digital HDDs in a ZFS raidz2 configuration. From February 2nd 2010 I’ve been sampling the internal SMART temperature senors of each drive every 6 minutes. This post summarises some of what I’ve captured.

I’d been toying recently with building OpenWRT natively under FreeBSD, but my Google-fu failed to reveal a sufficiently up-to-date “how to”. So, I had a colleague (Chris Holman) nut out the details, and we’ve put up short description here of how we prepared both a FreeBSD 8.x jail and a FreeBSD 9.1 (actually a PCBSD 9.1) […]

I’m experimenting with building animations to help early-year students visualise the relationships between signals and statistics about signals. For example, I constructed the following animated gif to show how the sampled data points from a sine wave, and a randomised sequence of the same sampled data points, results in the same CDF at multiples of […]

This post describes the small patch required to the FreeBSD Port of avrdude 5.11 to enable programming of the Arduino Uno R3 directly from a PCBSD 9.1 desktop. At the time of writing, the Arduino IDE version 1.0.3 is available as a PCBSD “PBI“. This PBI bundles avrdude version 5.11, which does the low-level programming for […]